‘Detroit’ is a movie on fire

Kathryn Bigelow doesn’t revise genres; she douses them with lighter fluid and lights a match. Her films are muscular, immediate, and propulsive, but never lack emotional heft. At their heart is the issue of camaraderie under pressure—see the bank robbing fraternity of Point Break, the travelling band of vampires in Near Dark, and the squadron of bomb-defusing soldiers that try to survive The Hurt Locker.

Zero Dark Thirty, a sweeping dramatization of the decade-long hunt to track down and kill Osama bin Laden, was a shift in scale for Bigelow. While similar conflicts of loyalty and morality play out within Jessica Chastain’s shadowy operative, there’s a grander focus on the linkage between interrogation and terror. This theme connects the dots between state-sanctioned fundamentalism and morally abhorrent foreign policy.

Detroit, which is set during that city’s harrowing July 1967 riots, inverts this motif to expose how long-gestating domestic injustice constrains the lives of vulnerable citizens. Spilling out into the open streets with hand-held urgency, the film brazenly addresses the fractured relationship between disenfranchised minorities and compromised institutions that are supposed to protect and serve. Messy, timely and rightfully enraged, Bigelow’s docudrama is eerily relevant.

An animated prologue (reminiscent of the filmmaker’s anti-poaching short film Last Days) briefly chronicles black migration and segregation in the 20th century that produced irreconcilable tensions in cities like Detroit. This edifying stylistic statement is the first of many that don’t always cohere with each other. Bigelow’s core goal is not to create a seamless historical narrative, but jarringly oscillate between personal perspectives entrapped by the same pervasive uncertainty.

From here the film jumps into the fray. A haphazard police raid of a local bar sets off fire bombings and looting, inspiring Gov. George W. Romney and President Lyndon B. Johnson (seen only in archival footage) to mount a militarized response with riot police, National Guardsmen and two Army Airborne divisions. Bigelow masterfully maneuvers the escalation of hostilities, showing the brutally swift occupation of a community space that has long suffered under the stranglehold of poverty. Tanks roll down the street firing into windows, police stations overflow with black prisoners, and entire blocks burn indiscriminately.

Eventually, Detroit centers on the tragic events that transpired between two days in July at the Algiers Motel where a trio of local policemen (played by Will Poulter, Jack Reynor and Ben O’Toole) terrorize and murder three innocent black youths. The nearly hour-long set piece forces the viewer to experience every moment of fear and terror from the ground level, a horrifying portrait of abuse, racism and insecurity masquerading as authority.

The incident unfolds almost in real time through a relentless series of interrogations. John Boyega’s well-meaning security guard can only intervene at pragmatic times, watching helplessly as the innocent victims suffer pointless acts of humiliation. The extended duration and close proximity make it all the more unsettling.

If the Algiers set piece is stress incarnate, the aftermath produces a numbing sense of isolation that is almost unbearable. Bigelow’s patient camera keeps coming back to the tragic character of Larry Cleveland (Algee Smith), a traumatized Motown singer whose bookended musical performances give the film its soulfulness.

Late in Detroit, which opens Friday, Aug. 4, segregated black citizens momentarily refuse the courtroom’s order to “all rise.” Their white peers, including those police officers on trial, turn around and stare at them intimidatingly. The group begrudgingly acquiesces, but not without their own collective reverse shot of defiance that reclaims a sense of justice no matter the court ruling.

Indeed, authority figures don’t own Detroit. It’s a film that belongs solely to the people who are fed up with the status quo and continue to demand better. In this context, it’s an essential historical echo of Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte and every distraught community that still struggles to obtain those inalienable human rights that are promised but are so rarely delivered.